What would you do?

Last Thursday something interesting happened to me. Well nothing really happened to me but I was witness to something quite interesting and it made me think. It was a holiday here where I live and I had decided to go along for a ride with my father and his girlfriend, they were off to the local shopping centre to pick up some things that they needed. I didn’t have anything better to do so I decided to go with them. It was a nice day outside and the sun was shining. When we arrived at the shopping centre our first trip was to the electronics store which wasn’t actually located in the mall but just outside of it. We went inside to search for empty disc cases and a print cartridge for their printer. Being that I didn’t really have a reason to be there I just wondered around gawking at amazing pieces of flashy equipment that I would never have a need nor a use for. After coming to the conclusion that almost everything in the store was way out of my price range I decided I would go outside and wait for them in the beautiful light of day. I stood out side the door for maybe a minute or two and got impatient as I usually do, so I snuck back in just to take a peek at where they were. They were already through the check out and on their way out of the store. As the three of us walked out of the store together we saw three employees of another store that was just up the street come shooting past us at full speed. Up ahead of the employees there was a young man dressed in jeans and a jean jacket doing everything he could to get away from them. It was a full out foot pursuit. As the employees gained on the young man it seemed as if he had given up, he stopped running and the store employees had caught him. The four men turned around and began to walk back towards the store that they had originally come from. I assumed that they were headed back to call the police and to return the goods that the young man had obviously stolen. As the four individuals approached the area where we were standing, I noticed that the store employees weren’t even holding the man they had been chasing nor were they even paying much attention to him and on top of that the man was on his cell phone. That struck me as a little odd and sure enough my feeling was right. Just before they reached where we were standing the man took off at full speed again, this time heading towards the road where a car was waiting for him with the back door open. The store employees bolted after him again. The young thief dove into the car but not before the employees grabbed a hold of him. As the men tried their hardest to pull him back out of the vehicle the other men in the car tried their hardest to hold on. After about a minute of brawling inside the vehicle I guess the driver decided enough was enough and he hit the gas, running over the foot of one of the store employee’s. Although that was the end of this event for the young thief and the store employees, it wasn’t the end of it for me and the questions I was asking myself.

As the day progressed I realized something interesting, I realized that if it weren’t for my impatience that day I would have had a very important decision to make. If I hadn’t gone back into the store to see where my father and his girlfriend were, that thief would have ran right past me with the store employee’s directly in pursuit and it would have been obvious that he had done something wrong. What burnt my brain about this was that I couldn’t figure out for myself if I would have done something about it. Would I have taken it upon myself to lay the smack down on this guy thus becoming the hero of the day or would I have simply watched as they flew past me. Is it really worth it to get involved in a situation such as this? Was I even capable of making a split second decision like I would have had to had I been standing out there? These were all questions that ran through my head later that day. The more I thought about it the more I wondered. It has now been a few days since this event and I still haven’t come to any conclusion. I don’t think that the problem lies in the situation it self, I am almost certain that I would have tried to lend a helping hand and gracefully or not so gracefully would have attempted to tackle the guy. The problem that I face is that I don’t know if I am capable of making a decision like that in that amount of time. Some of us may be blessed with this split second decision making and for the rest of us I think it takes time and effort to be able to train ourselves to make decisions quickly. Life is full of decisions and choices we have to make and I think if we work hard at learning how to make good decisions quickly we can all make life a little easier for ourselves. One must tread carefully under these circumstances though. We don’t want to just make all of our life decisions on the whim; we want to train ourselves to make these decisions carefully and accurately while still doing it with haste. It’s a talent that takes many years of practice. So the next time you find yourself with a decision to make that’s burning your brain try to think about what could help you speed up the process but if you find that difficult don’t worry, so do I and many others.

Jesse Roulette
Catching bad guys One at a Time

Choices

Ok, so here is something that’s been bothering me for a little while now. The other day I was having a conversation with a close friend of mine. It turned out to be quite the intellectual conversation if I do say so myself. My good friend who I will call Mitchell happened to disagree with something I had written in a previous article. Now I’m all for good conversation and constructive criticism so I asked him what was on his mind. In my article called “Memories” I talked a little bit about fate and destiny, I mentioned how I like to call these things just plain old luck of the draw. The disagreement began. Mitchell argued the point with me that in my situation luck nor fate nor destiny had anything to do with the outcome of events in my life. He argued that I had chosen my situation and I was the only one to blame for the consequences I was suffering. Now I didn’t disagree with that at all, I realize I made my own choices and I am dealing with the respective consequences, but the discussion went deeper than that. Mitchell argued that everything that happens to us in our lives is product of our own choices and I concur, to an extent. I posed a scenario to Mitchell, a scenario which I will pose to you now.

A man is walking down a path he has walked down many times before. Along this path he must walk past a short section of overhanging cliff. There have never before been any sort of dangerous circumstances associated with this cliff or anywhere else along the entire path. Though on this day things were different, something happened. A large piece of rock from the overhanging cliff above breaks off and lands on the man, he is paralyzed from the neck down.

Ok, so that’s the scenario. Now because Mitchell had told me he believed everything in life was product of our own choices I had to ask him to explain to me how this man chose to become paralyzed. Now obviously he didn’t directly choose to become paralyzed, but he did choose to take that walk. At this point in the conversation I partially agreed with Mitchell’s theory of choices, but not entirely. I told Mitchell I agreed to the fact that the man made the choice to take his walk, but my real question was deeper than that. I wanted to know what Mitchell thought could have made that rock fall at that exact moment in time. Now of coarse a rock can’t choose to fall but I was to find out that there were many scientific answers to that question such as erosion and wind and temperature. Mitchell explained to me how all of the perfect weather conditions combined could have absolutely caused that rock to fall. I agreed with him but I wanted more. I asked him what he thought made those weather conditions perfect on that day. Now, we argued pointlessly about this for a few more minutes and came to the conclusion that there probably wasn’t an answer to this question without beginning to discuss the realm of spirituality, so we let it be, for now. There was a method behind all of my madness, I said to Mitchell “Think about this man laying in his hospital bed knowing that he will never walk again, knowing that he will never be able to enjoy the things he used to enjoy. Don’t you think there will be emotions inside of him that wonder why did this happen, or who did this to him?” Mitchell promptly replied “Of coarse there will be.” I reached deep into the confines of my brain and posed my final question thinking that I would stump him with this one. “Who does this man blame for what happened to him, or how does he get closure without knowing why?” I have to say I was somewhat enlightened by Mitchell’s response. “He has to realize that no body is to blame for what happened to him and that even though he made the choice to take that walk there was probably nothing he could have done otherwise. He has to accept the things that have happened to him and he has to move on with his life in a new way, and that’s just a choice he has to make.” There it was, he was absolutely right, in the end it did come down to choices.

For myself and Mitchell this conversation was probably just a waste of forty minutes but by posting it here I hope that maybe it will enlighten somebody in the way it enlightened me. Our lives do revolve around the choices we make and that’s really good news for us because it means we’re in control. We have the final say in the things that happen to us. Although we might not be able to choose the situations we sometimes find our selves entangled in, we defiantly choose what we’re going to do about them. So the next time you’re in a real down and out situation try not to worry about how you got there and just remember it’s your choice that can get you out.

Jesse Roulette
Making Choices One at a Time